10 April 2013

Confessions of a Counter-Revolutionary

By Victor Davis Hanson

“Counter-revolutionary” is an apt term for these days: President
Obama has promised to make a fundamental transformation, a veritable
revolution in American society and culture. Those who oppose such an
ongoing agenda are suspected of all sorts of racism, nativism, misogyny,
homophobia, and general counter-revolutionary activity.

So — here are some thoughtcrimes:

Global warming

The latest news on “climate change” was not good for global-warming,
cap-and-trade zealots. The planet did not heat up in the last decade
and a half, despite substantial increases in carbon emissions. The much
ballyhooed “Marcott paper” (supposedly millennia of conclusive climate
data!) has been largely discredited, and shares the company of the East
Anglia email trove (e.g., “The fact is that we can’t account for the
lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. … Our
observing system is inadequate”).

Why the counter-revolutionary suspicion of global warming? I know
that the forces of market capitalism are potent, but they certainly lack
the powers of the sun and solar system to alter the earth. I have also
spent too much time in academia and met too many professors not to know
that politicization has infected campus teaching and research —
especially the doctrine that the noble ends always justify the
occasionally suspect means.

It is the penance that instead counts — an Al Gore lecturing upscale
students on polar bear populations so he can use his carbon-offsetted
private jet to save them. There is the matter of “cool” too: Worrying
about global warming is like drinking Starbucks as you enter Whole
Foods; in contrast, worrying about cheap natural gas to help the poor
have warm homes is like drinking a McDonald’s latte as you are greeted
at the door of Walmart.

I have met very few academics, politicians, or journalists who knew much about guns. Few of them hunt. Most do not live in bad
neighborhoods or drive long distances, sometimes through or into rough
areas. I suspect few work alone at night. Few are plagued by woodpeckers
destroying an eave on the barn, varmints digging under the shed
pavement, or a rabid coyote too close to the doghouse.

So when I hear a liberal expert propose yet another round of Second
Amendment infringement, I expect confusion about magazines, clips,
calibers, rifles, shotguns, pistols, “automatic” and “semi-automatic,”
and “assault weapons.” (Four hours, black spray paint, a sheet of
aluminum, cardboard, tin snips, solder, and super glue, and you perhaps
could make my ancient semi-automatic .22 resemble a scary “assault
rifle.”)

So far I have heard of no proposed legislation that would have
stopped Sandy Hook or Columbine, tragically so. To have prevented
another unhinged loser from shooting children and teens would have
required a police state to have confiscated millions of previously sold
legal weapons and ammunition, or to have had armed guards in the
schools. There is no legal support for the former or political support
for the latter.

The Sandy Hook shooter’s sick fascination with violent video games
and his aberrant psychological state (or was it an autistic-like
impairment?) were the stronger catalysts of his mayhem. Yet I know that
the Obama administration has no desire to go after Hollywood moguls
regarding gratuitous gun violence on the big screen,
much less take on the ACLU and the psychiatry industry about either
psychotropic drugs or the ability of the clearly unhinged to avoid
incarceration.

There is a predictability in the liberal mindset: it prefers the
iconic to the substantial in matters of controversy. Address the
misdemeanor, ignore the felony.

To stop most gun-related deaths in general in the U.S., we would have to focus on inner-city youths (cf. both the success and controversyof stop-and-frisk in New York). We would have to target young minority
males in advertising to make the illicit use of the gun comparable to
the social unattractiveness of … well, smoking.

I cannot see any of that happening. So we go after the demonic gun
that causes less than 1% of annual gun-related deaths, feel good about
doing something “for the children,” and derive an added psychic uplift
that such a superfluous something also enrages the lower-middle class —
especially the slightly rural, mostly white male Sarah Palin
constituent. The First Amendment is sacrosanct and must be expanded; the
Second is suspect and must be deflated.

Gay Marriage

Sometime about a year ago, the long-held position of Barack Obama and
the Clintons on gay marriage — No! — became, in Emmanuel Goldstein
fashion, abhorrent. Indeed, they’ve become harsh critics of those who still believe as they recently did.

Most Americans are fine with civil unions and, in live-and-let-live
fashion, don’t worry all that much about gay marriage. Nonetheless, why
the sudden dramatic change, if not for brilliant messaging and
well-funded liberal gay donors whose pledges were made contingent on
fluidity on the issue?

Key to the transformation in popular culture was the radical change
in the perception of male homosexuality. In the 1980s and 1990s — read
the work of the late gay investigative journalist Randy Shilts, or the
old videos of San Francisco parades or arguments over bath houses —
there was the general impression that male homosexuality was both more
promiscuous than either heterosexual or lesbian practice, and that
passive sexual intercourse was a catalyst for the spread of the AIDS
virus and hepatitis (suddenly a venereal disease in a way it had not
been in the past) in a manner that “normative” heterosexual intercourse
was not.

Mention of male homosexuality in the news was usually linked with
sexual practice, and the result was not favorable to the majority of the
public. The age-old word “sodomy” was not then the taboo term that it
is now. That perception — reality, whatever one calls it — has now
vanished. “Gay” is a non-sexual sobriquet that involves vaguely defined
expressions of affection. To suggest that anal intercourse is
statistically more likely to be unhygienic or, if practiced with
frequency, to run the risk of either hepatitis or AIDS is now proof of
homophobia. Indeed, so is the use of “homosexual” for “gay.”

Most of us do not think too much about it, other than to ensure that
we treat people — in my case whether in evaluating students, grant
applicants, or scholars — equally, with no interest at all in their sexual lives.

That said, the transformation in gay-advocacy strategy has been
nothing short of remarkable, its signature achievement being that there
is absolutely nothing much different between gay male and straight male
sexual congress — and that those who believe there is are themselves
bigots.

If so, we should soon expect the liberal popular culture — from the
movies of Quentin Tarantino to the recent Spartacus series — to stop
presenting anal penetration as an especially unwelcome sort of act, or a
particular nasty sort of sexual coercion.

In the logic of gay marriage, liberal culture — art, cinema, movies,
journalism, politics — will soon represent gay male sexual practice as
an act as natural as any other, without value judgments of any sort
attached to it. Also, I would expect in the years ahead that the law, as
it does now, will not add enhanced charges like “anal penetration” or
“sodomy” to sexual criminal complaints. I am confused in this
progressive era why I still read that a particular sex offender suspect
is to be considered especially odious, by adding details to his charges
like “sodomy” or “anal penetration.” Why qualify, much less legally
enhance, the particular details of rape?

Incidentally, in matters of sexual consistency, there should be no
longer suspicions of adult males being Brownie or Girl Scout Masters,
given that the gay rights movement has made the Boy Scouts themselves
suspect for unfairly discouraging gay Scout Masters. Is a forty-year old
heterosexual male any more likely to look upon young girls in untoward
fashion than a forty-year old gay male would young boys? Gay marriage is
not the end of a long struggle, but the very beginning of a brave new
world whose contours we can only imagine.

Illegal Immigration

In good 1984-style, the Associated Press just outlawed
“illegal immigrant.” Apparently “illegal alien” was so odious that its
banishment was automatic and not worthy of citation. Yet what does
“undocumented” mean, given one usually never applied for documents to be
un-anything?

As Orwell saw, imprecision, or rather deliberate distortion, in language is always the first characteristic of the totalitarian.

Here are the public’s problems with illegal immigration, from 1-5:

1. The law: Once one group feels that it is exempt
from federal law, others might as well, too. If I choose to break a
federal statute of my own choosing with impunity, why would I fear doing
the same with others? Who needs to file a 1040 or worry about car
registration, a building permit, a fishing license, or rabies pet
vaccination?

We forget that the illegal immigrant serially violates the
law in obtaining all sorts of fraudulent documents (how can one with a
false Social Security number be “undocumented”?), any one violation of
which would harm the job or education prospects of a U.S. citizen.

2. The tribe: Illegal immigration, largely from
Latin America, is too often implicitly predicated on ethnic chauvinism.
Were it a matter of Southeast Asians or Poles coming illegally and en
masse, La Raza activism would be nonexistent — or championing law
enforcement.

The Democratic Party in general supports massive influxes, followed
by periodic amnesties, followed by expanded entitlements, followed by
political loyalty for 3-4 generations. La Raza activists see numbers as
key to incomplete assimilation that in turn leads to salad-bowl like
political constituencies. Without massive immigration, the Democratic
Party’s base — greens, gays, single women, metrosexual young yuppie
couples, African-Americans, third-generation Asians and Latinos — does
not guarantee the much-promised new demography. As a rough observation,
red-state, church-going nuclear families seem to be having more kids
than blue-state sorts.

Once the impoverished Oaxacan immigrant crosses the border, he
becomes statistical proof that Latinos have not achieved parity with the
majority culture, due to all sorts of –isms and –ologies that can only
be addressed by more government programs staffed by activists. The fact
of why and how he was impoverished and whom was to blame before he
crossed the border is too illiberal to be addressed.

The most frightening statistic I know in regards to illegal
immigration is the disappointing performance of second-generation
California Latinos in standardized tests and graduating from high
school.

Compare this quote from an April 2012 Wall Street Journal article written by George P. Shultz and Eric A. Hanushek:

But the averages mask the truly sad story in the Latino
population, soon to become California’s dominant demographic group.
Hispanics attending school in California perform no better than the
average student in Mexico, a level comparable to the typical student in
Kazakhstan. An alarming 43% of Hispanic students in California did not
complete high school between 2005 and 2009, and only 10% attained a
college degree.

Where did all that massive money spent in remedial help and education go, if Mexico does as good a job as the U.S?

A word like raza really does mean race, as in the superior
race. Because it compounds the assumptions of an exceptional language
and ethnic heritage and racial identity, it is pernicious in the way
unquestioned use of volk in 19th-century Germany logically grew into something quite scary 100 years later.

3. Helot labor is helot labor: Something is quite
sick when a country of chronic 7.6% unemployment (in fact, much higher
when we count those who gave up looking for work) wants to import a
million menial laborers.

Either entitlements are too generous, or no longer tied to work
participation, or we have lost the respect for a shared experience of
entry-level physical drudgery, the traditional perquisite to character. I
grew up with the bracero program, and remember the old Harvest of Shame-like
documentaries, the Woody Guthrie “Deportee” activist songs, and the
seasonal liberal op-eds deploring the exploitation. The premise that
America can institutionalize the idea that you are good enough to work
for us but not good enough to be one of us just won’t work.

Mark my words: the guest-worker program is an invitation to exploitation, endless social activism, serial amnesties, and more ethnic tensions.

4. Numbers impair assimilation:Bring in 100,000
immigrants and we are a melting pot of assimilation as Latinos follow
the paradigm of the Italians; but bring in nearly 1,000,000 a year, and
illegally so, and we are a salad-bowl, Balkanized society of competing
factions.

Legality, English, and a diploma guarantee successful assimilation,
which used to be desirable; the antithesis to all that ensures difficult
assimilation, which to too many elites is now more desirable. How did
assimilation, integration, and intermarriage become
counter-revolutionary?

5. Legal immigration is mostly ignored, other than
in platitudes about meritocratic criteria (e.g., education, skill sets,
capital, etc.). Democrats sing of legal immigration as if they were the
party working to get the brilliant Nigerian electrical engineer his
green card at Google. Maybe, maybe not. But does Joe Biden or Chuck
Schumer ever say the following?

We need to predicate immigration on legality and on
precisely those skills needed by American society — and therefore we
must close the borders to those who would come illegally, without a
high-school diploma, and knowledge of English, given they are far more
likely to draw on rather than contribute to the finances of the U.S.

The classically liberal position on immigration (e.g., treat everyone
on a racially blind and ethnically blind basis; ensure that those who
took the trouble to follow the law are privileged over those who did not
and cut in line; apply meritocratic criteria not subject to racial or
ethnic bias; and for applicants of roughly similar qualifications,
ensure a rough “diversity” that results in Asians, Latin Americans,
Africans, and Europeans entering in about equal numbers) is now
counter-revolutionary.

The Economy

Here is what you do if you are a revolutionary who wishes to transform the American economy: